Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

by John Waters

  I look out the front window and all is silent. It’s like a happy Jonestown. All the tripper kids are sleeping, passed out next to each other, smiles on the zonked-out faces, some holding hands, all lying in rows. I half crawl back to the bedroom area and see Crawford, Marshmellow, and Otis asleep, all their limbs tangled around each other in love and support. I have such faith in young people. I don’t wake them. I let them dream in peace.

  GOOD RIDE NUMBER SEVEN

  READY WHIP

  It’s another beautiful fucking morning in America. For once I have to walk a bit but I don’t mind, it gives me time to reflect on what a good idea this whole hitchhiking thing has been. Still reveling in my newfound bliss, I hear a car screech around the corner and come speeding up the little street toward me. Whoa! Somebody’s in a hurry! Usually I am uptight about anybody driving too fast when I’m in the car, but my rides have been so lovely, I throw caution to the wind and stick out my I’M NOT PSYCHO sign to see how it works. The car’s driver hits the brakes, does a donut wheel, and flips open the passenger’s-side door from his side. “Where you going?” I ask, a little put off to see an Italian-looking guy about forty years old with long hair and some kind of orange jumpsuit hugging his wiry body. His arms are covered in rudely altered religious tattoos (Little Lulu and Richie Rich replace Jesus’ disciples at the Last Supper) and he has a dollar sign inked on each hand. “Hell,” he answers with a winning snarl, “get in!” I do.

  As he floors it, I hear a police siren in the distance and panic a little when my driver accelerates even faster and goes right past the I-70 entrance ramp even though I tell him that’s the way I’m headed. “We’re goin’ the back roads,” he announces, leaving no room for debate. The hair on my neck stands up when I suddenly realize his orange jumpsuit is actually a Kansas Federal Prison uniform. Even I have heard of Leavenworth, whose name is stitched across the front. “I’m Ready Whip,” he says, “and I’ll take you as far as Hays, Kansas, if we get that far!” I hear more sirens in the distance, and Ready Whip turns off on another little country road and takes an even more out-of-the-way detour. “Are you in trouble, Mr. Ready Whip?” I ask, trying to be nonchalant, as some poor squirrel, used to slower traffic, unsuccessfully tries to cross the road and is flattened by our late-seventies Ford Galaxie. “Cut the ‘Mr.,’” he orders with a sexy command, “just call me Ready Whip, ’cause my dick’s ready and I’m always ready to whip it out.” “I see,” I say with open-minded astonishment. “But first I need some new clothes,” he announces as he pulls into a tiny little town that doesn’t have a name. Before I can begin to imagine shopping with my new host, he slams on the brakes when he sees a pitiful Laundromat that doesn’t look as if it’s been remodeled since the fifties. “Go in there and steal me some underpants.” “WHAT?!” I say in alarm. “You heard me, Mr. John Waters, I know who you are. I seen you on TV in the joint—on Danielle Steele’s Family Album. What a piece of shit.” Before I can defend one of my most obscure acting credits, he barks, “Hurry up—I need jeans, too, thirty-four-inch waist, medium T-shirts, and socks for an eleven-and-a-half-inch foot.” Shocked and feeling like Caril Ann Fugate taking orders from Charles Starkweather in that real-life fifties crime spree, I do what I’m told. The police sirens in the distance seem to have quieted, so why not?

  Inside the Laundromat, there are only two customers, a pregnant teenage girl with her whining baby and a farmer who is asleep on a broken-down plastic chair that for some reason is chained to a radiator. I case the joint, realizing how completely out of place I look. “Forget your laundry, dumbbell?” the probably unwed mother cracks. “No, I just need to buy soap, if it’s any business of yours,” I snap, feeling a little of Ready Whip’s anger almost by osmosis. “Machine’s broke,” she mutters as she opens the dryer door, puts her baby inside, and rocks it back and forth without shame until the infant gurgles happily. “You gotta dollar?” she suddenly demands. “My clothes are in the washer but I don’t got dryer money. Two dollars a load?! Do these fuckers think I’m made of money?” Seeing the only spinning dryer full of clothes, I think fast. “I’ll give you ten dollars if you keep your mouth shut,” I offer. “Mister, I don’t go on ‘dates,’” she responds with, in my opinion, uncalled-for haughtiness. “I don’t want that, sugar,” I answer, trying to be friendly in a film-noir kind of way, “I got a date of my own and he’s waiting outside.” She watches in silence as I fling open the dryer door and start rooting through the farmer’s still-damp laundry. He still doesn’t move. Maybe he’s dead. “Give me twenty,” she suddenly demands as she spins her baby around one full turn in the dryer without letting it fall out. I give her the money. She takes her child out of the dryer and unwraps a Zero candy bar from her purse and lets the kid nibble the white chocolate. “Knock yourself out, soap bubble,” she hisses as she puts the bill in her pocket and burps the baby, a little too hard if you ask me. I grab the only pair of jeans inside that aren’t overalls (the most hideous outfit a man can ever wear), all the socks, a few pairs of boxer shorts, and one still-wet T-shirt and rush out the door.

  “What were you doin’, ironing?” Ready Whip impatiently cracks as I jump in his car with his motor running. “So?” I ask him, holding up the wet Hanes T-shirt for his approval as he speeds away. “Beats this piece of shit,” he answers as he starts to unbutton his jumpsuit while continuing to drive. “It’s a thirty-three waist,” I read from the worn Levi’s label on the back of the jeans. “It’ll fit,” he grunts as he suddenly steers the car over to the side of the road, gets out, kicks off his prison sneakers (the kind with the Velcro straps so you can’t use the shoelaces to strangle yourself), pulls off his filthy socks, and begins to strip out of his jail uniform. He seems completely unperturbed that he is now totally nude by the side of the road. “Memorize this dick, John,” he demands, and even though I’m completely startled by his sudden sexual frankness, I do. Fantasies are like extra cash, they need to be banked for later use. I chuckle to myself, remembering Quentin Tarantino’s hilarious line onstage when I interviewed him for the Provincetown Film Festival. “What was the best thing about your success?” I had asked, and he answered, “Pussy … no, the memory of pussy.” Now I know what he meant. Cars continue to whiz by, drivers shouting catcalls to Ready Whip, but I just watch him nude the way a cultist would a beloved midnight movie while trucks honk their horns in one long chorus of indignation. He turns to me full frontally and makes his dick jump without touching it. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, so I applaud. “One day I’m gonna tell my children that John Waters looked at my dick…,” he growls, stuffing his still fully erect penis back into the freshly stolen jeans of the farmer, “but right now we got business still to do.” What could that mean, I think in sudden nervousness. “Down, boy,” he orders his cock as he struggles to zip up, just as if he were a ventriloquist talking to his dummy. He wriggles his torso into the now almost dry T-shirt and I can tell he’s turned on by my lustful eyes as he climbs back inside the car.

  “Now, put on them socks,” he demands with a strange affection as he sticks out one foot toward me and wriggles his toes. I shove on the sock with care and tenderness and an unhealthy desire to please. “That tickles, bitch,” he says with a giggle, and I debate if I should be offended, but when his big toe pops out of the hole in the sock the farmer never thought to mend, I decide to just go with the flow. “Size eleven and a half,” he brags, “don’t touch, just look … go ahead, take a cell phone picture of them if you want.” I fumble for my BlackBerry.

  But before any red-hot photo session can take place we hear a new police siren wailing in the distance. Only this time it sounds like more than one. Ready Whip jams those puppies back into his prison shoes and we’re outta here. “Fuck those pigs!” he yells in a rage I haven’t heard since the sixties. “I got a bank job to do, porkers!” he shouts as we zoom down the country lane. So that’s what he does for a living, I think, impressed before suddenly realizing I should be frightened. “You’re not
gonna rob a bank now, are you?” I sputter. “I’m not, we are,” he answers with confidence. “No, look,” I beg, “my friend Patty Hearst got in a lot of trouble for helping to rob a bank and it wasn’t even her fault. I mean—am I a hostage?” “Hell no, dude, I just want you to watch,” he says, laughing. “Watch what?” I ask in confusion. “Me and my dick … being bad,” he whispers with a narcissistic, exhibitionist wink as we pull into a small gravel parking lot outside a tiny brick building. SUNFLOWER BANK, HAYS, KANSAS reads the low-tech sign. “Open them peepers, Mr. Creeper, and watch my cock,” he purrs, “’cause ol’ Ready Whip luvs doin’ a bank job!”

  He grabs a can of Mountain Dew from under the seat, puts a brown paper bag over it, and aims it toward the bank. “Armed and dangerous,” he cracks, with one final adjustment to his crotch, which already seems to be anticipating the crime scene and its erotic possibilities. “Wait forty-five seconds, then follow me in and act surprised,” he directs as he opens the car door and gets out, carrying the paper bag with the “gun” concealed inside.

  I do as my director tells me, timing the forty-five seconds exactly on my watch, excitedly imagining the triumphant entrance of Ready Whip’s penis inside the bank. I get out, pretend to be an extra in a movie, and casually stroll across the parking lot and enter.

  I see Ready Whip approaching the teller, a black woman in her twenties dressed in an atrocious maxiskirt, sensible shoes, and a hairdo no one would ever copy. A goofy-looking man in the little office on the side, who may be the boss, is explaining to an angry lady farmer why there is a fee for a cash deposit to her savings account. Ready Whip aims his Mountain Dew gun at the clerk and shouts, “This is a holdup!” and grabs her around the neck. I may be the only one that notices the groin bulging in Ready Whip’s jeans. She starts screaming, the manager just stands there with openmouthed shock, the farmer-lady customer laughs out loud and mutters, “Serves you right,” and the rent-a-cop puts his hands in the air and starts crying. “Hey, you,” Ready Whip growls to me with convincing menace and a slight thrusting of his groin that I can’t imagine anyone else notices, “get your skinny ass over here and hand over your wallet.” I play my part convincingly and beg him not to kill me, and he grabs me with his free hand and puts it around my neck, still allowing me a partial view down to his now blatantly hard cock. Maybe it’s my paranoia, but I think the girl hostage sees it, too! She hands over the bags of money to Ready Whip and the manager tells her, “Continue doing as you are told. Nobody needs to get hurt.” “Please don’t shoot me,” the guard begs, “I got tickets to see Drake tonight in Wichita.” “Call the cops and I pull the trigger,” Ready Whip threatens as we make our getaway, both the girl teller and me still strangled by his arms around our necks. Ready Whip zigzags us both across the parking lot to the car, waving his gun as a few pedestrians dive behind parked cars. He throws us both in the front seat, gets behind the wheel, and we make a break for it at a sudden high speed. I wonder why Ready Whip doesn’t point the gun at the girl anymore. Stranger, she seems to calm down immediately, even when he gives me my wallet back. “You looked hot in there, Ready Whip,” she suddenly coos as Ready Whip once again adjusts his erect package inside his pants. She pulls off her wig to reveal a partially shaved head with the words READY WHIP trimmed in her hair in some sort of modified Mohawk. She snaps off her rigged breakaway maxiskirt and blouse and I see that every inch of her ebony body that was covered by her disguise is filled with white tattoos. She is wearing a corset and a push-up black bra with a black net see-through minidress. “Polk-A-Dotty, meet John Waters,” says Ready Whip as he whips out his dick and displays it proudly. Polk-A-Dotty!? That was the name of the very first hand puppet I owned as a child, I silently marvel, all the while hypnotized by Ready Whip’s crotch presentation. “Where the hell did you two meet?” she wonders, watching the penis performance herself with voyeuristic zeal before tearing her eyes away to count the stolen money from the bags. “Six thousand dollars,” she purrs between quick looks back to Ready Whip’s own personal Bethlehem Steel. “He’s been watching it, too,” our cock conductor gently murmurs, “just like you do, Polk-A-Dotty.” “For seven straight years!” Polk-A-Dotty brags to me proudly as Ready Whip throbs his cock to the left, then to the right, then straight up and down. It’s like the exhibitionist Olympics. “Look but never ever touch,” he whispers to us both as he floors the accelerator, and Polk-A-Dotty and I turn to each other in acceptance, happy to share.

  But even at this high speed, nosy authorities try to ruin our newly formed mutual admiration society. We hear the sound of helicopters above and then the faint sound of police sirens in the distance. “Fuck,” yells Ready Whip, “I was just about to come.” To drown out the sounds of the cops, he turns on the radio and, wouldn’t you know it, “Chain Gang” by Bobby Scott booms through the car’s shitty sound system. “This is the Kansas State Police,” we hear amplified from an overhead police loudspeaker. “Ready Whip, you are surrounded. Pull over your vehicle. Drop your weapon and release the hostages.” “WATCH MY DICK ONE LAST TIME!!” Ready Whip orders as he swerves off the road onto an even narrower path, and we do, God, we do, but the sound of crashing branches on the hood and crunching foliage under the car distracts me for one second and I look up and see a big tree ahead, right in our speeding path. “Look out, look out!” I scream in my best Shangri-Las “Leader of the Pack” vocal imitation, but it’s too late. We collide with nature and Ready Whip’s head goes through the windshield, but amazingly, our air bags, unlike his, go off and save our lives. We look over and are relieved to see that Ready Whip had climaxed the instant he died, a happy ending indeed. “Run!” Polk-A-Dotty suddenly screams, and I see the Kansas police charging toward us. We take off holding hands, joined together in a mournful voyeuristic afterglow few could understand.

  GOOD RIDE NUMBER EIGHT

  BUSTER

  We’re in some kind of abandoned state park. I pull Polk-A-Dotty down an overgrown walking trail and we keep running, past broken-down and rusted playground equipment, boarded-up restroom facilities, rotted picnic tables, even an abandoned baseball diamond that has been completely scorched by some sort of brush fire. We cross a slimy, polluted creek under a bridge that has partially collapsed. We hear police dogs approaching, not far in the distance.

  Remembering a famous case in Baltimore where the fugitive Joseph Palczynski escaped by simply hiding in a tree because police tracking dogs aren’t trained to smell “up” and the cops never thought to look to the sky, I motion for Polk-A-Dotty to follow me up a large evergreen. She has already changed into a pair of heels, but this girl is no fashion amateur—not only can she run in spikes, she can climb a tree wearing them, too! We freeze on two separate branches as the cops and their snarling bloodhounds run right past us. Hearing the chopper landing at Ready Whip’s death scene, we make a break for it.

  As soon as we turn a corner in the shitty little spoiled-nature path, we see a miracle. A motley caravan of broken-down wagons, trailers, and flatbed trucks pulling vintage amusement-park rides that anybody could tell has seen better days is taking the most obscure route away from the interstate to avoid detection.THE HIPSTER CARNIVAL, reads the hand-painted logo on the first truck in line, with the added come-on below: WE’RE ON THE RUN LOOKIN’ FOR FUN! Polk-A-Dotty takes over, realizing she’s more of a hot-number hitchhiker than I’ll ever be, and sticks out her thumb. I hide in the bushes.

  The caravan slows down and Buster, the ringleader owner, eyes her suspiciously. “Lookin’ for work?” bellows the fifty-year-old Robert-Mitchum-meets-Richard-Tyson-from-Two-Moon-Junction look-alike. “What’ve you got to offer?” she answers back sassily, and the other Hipster Carnival workers, a peculiar collection of freakish yet bohemian drifters, peer out from their trailers. “Looking for a girl I can throw knives at for my act,” Buster gruffly answers, before adding with pride, “I don’t drug-test my employees, neither.” The roughneck carnies cheer and laugh in support. “What happened to the other gi
rl?” Polk-A-Dotty asks with flippant sauciness. “I missed,” Buster explains with a hint of sadness. “Is she going to be all right?” Polk-A-Dotty quickly asks. “Nope,” answers Buster without any further explanation. “Okay, I’ll take the job on one condition,” she barters. “What’s that?” Buster answers, amazed at her nerve. “My friend John Waters can come with us.”

  I step out of the bushes, and after a moment of complete silence, I am astonished that not only Buster but the entire crew of this decrepit little carnival burst into applause. I feel even more glad to be famous here than I do in New York City when garbagemen yell out my name and give me the thumbs-up. So crossed-over. Accepted.

  “I love the chicken-fucking scene in Pink Flamingos,” Buster announces with genuine respect. “Those fucking things hurt,” Macaroni, “The World’s Thinnest Model,” mimics Cookie Mueller’s line correctly, with a slight lisp, from her trailer before blowing me a kiss with her bony hands. “John Waters, I’m putting you in the freak show,” proclaims Buster with leadership, as Orca, “The Meanest Fat Lady,” shrieks out Divine’s line “Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” with a gusto that takes even me back. “As what?” I stammer to Buster, happy to have yet another career. “One look at you and I know,” he says like a wizard: “SEE A MAN WITH NO TATTOOS!” “Oh my God, he can see through clothes!” Polk-A-Dotty murmurs in awe, and while I won’t go that far, I have to admit he’s right. I’m tattoo free. We leap on board, thrilled to be rescued. Something putrid this way comes.